On a very clear but REALLY chilly afternoon Alys and I wandered down to Bosham, near Chichester in West Sussex to watch the sunset and for me to have a little bit of a go at some landscape photography.
It's a testament to the Sigma 24-70 lens that it went fairly happily from being used as a macro a week ago to being used as a landscape lens here and I think they turned out pretty well. It didn't work using a wide aperture, f2.8 looked pretty soft, but I think that's often the case when focusing a long way away. I stopped down to about f3.5-ish and they looked fine.
What I did have a play with was using RAW software to emulate a graduated filter on the lens. I don't think jpegs have the dynamic range for it to work but I shot in RAW (I always do anyway) and decided to see what I could get from these photos.
This one above have a very dark foreground so you couldn't make out any detail on the boat, the water wasn't very bright either. By darkening the sky and then brightening the whole picture it's really showing off the harbour.
I think I may have over-cooked it a bit on the one above but it shows what a RAW can do, I don't think that a jpeg would be as capable of such a change in brightness levels from the sky to the foreground (which really was very dark). It's at least two and half stops and although you probably wouldn't notice a difference here, when printed large there would certainly be some visible issues.
The last is my favourite by far though, I think the boat looks brilliant and the whole image looks right for Bosham.

All in, it was a good day out for the Alpha 700 and the Sigma, this sort of shot would have been improved with a wide angle lens such as the Sigma 10-20mm which could have given the scene a bit more impact but I think my wedding faithful did well.

On a very busy weekend before a truly frantic week at school I decided to take a few minutes away from the horrors of planning and see what I could see in the garden. It looks as though the spider's nest I disturbed when we moved into the house has born fruit!

They're pretty big fellas and there are a few of them around the garden (as well as in the house) making themselves useful catching flies. Normally one has managed to get a cobweb all the way across the garden as well, not the best way to be woken up in the morning as you stumble out in the dark to get the bike.

Because the web was in a really cramped place it was too close to use the Minolta 70-210 "beercan" and the Tamron 70-300 can be a bit soft sometimes. I had to try out the Sigma 24-70 as a macro, in all fairness it does describe itself as a macro lens but it hasn't got the same magnification ratio as the zooms.

I really like this lens attached to the Sony Alpha 700 and I'm getting a bit more brave with the f-stop recently. It stops out to f2.8 which I'm always worried will be a bit soft but the background 'Bokeh' (who came up with that word?) looks brilliant with that wide aperture. I tried the lens wide open for some portraits at school recently and as long as the focus is clear on the eyes they look really effective.

I'll need a different, fairly mental macro lens to get the spider much bigger and maybe a miniature studio so I can play with the lighting. Also, I'm going to get a plant mister to see if that brings out the cobweb.

*UPDATE* (!)

So, inspired by writing the blog above I wandered out into the garden when it was dark and probably weirded out the neighbours a bit by taking the 'Wotan' slave flash out and having a go at a bit of creative lighting.

There was a plant mister in the shed so I gave the poor spider a bit of a spritz to help show up the cobweb and make it look a bit more atmospheric. These first two were taken from standing up so you can see the fence in the background a bit, it's not obvious that it's a fence but I noticed it so it bothered me a bit.

Saying that, I was really happy with the photo below. The shadow picks out the spider really well and I think it give a good line to the photo, if you look at it large the spider's back looks almost be-jewelled with water droplets.

For these last two images I managed to get behind and underneath the cobweb, it was a bit of a nightmare seeing as I was sat on a plant and wedged into the corner of my fence under the apple tree. They came out well though, it was the look I was hoping for with the spider picked out against the dark sky.

The hardest part of all of this was trying to focus on a little spider in the pitch black (the flash auto-focus lamp was no help at all) which kept moving around whenever the wind blew. I ended up using a torch to pick it out and using manual focus to try and get it.

All in all, I enjoyed taking these photos and will have another go at insects at some point during the holidays when I can be up early in the AM to get some good misty morning insect macros.